Ecdysis
I cannot rest/always ready to run/always pretending I am not always ready to learn/even though there is nowhere to run to.
When did I lose consciousness?
An abyss of ghost-white stretches interminably.
As I struggle to rise, I welt my head.
Gasps—glass shards scatter across my skull like frozen stars.
Excruciating pain—I scream as an iron hand batters my spine.
Tick… tock… tick.
I am trapped within a clock; it tolls the lonely chime.
Metamorphosis begins.
I molt into a moth.
Desire ignites me, yet no soot in sight.
Obsession cradles, then gorges like a ravenous termite.
Fragile parchment wings seek forbidden suns.
Light devours more tenderly than love ever could.
I am a creature that mistakes annihilation for salvation.
Tick… tock… tick.
The gears whisper XXIII-I, etching it into my skin.
I molt into a poppy.
Lullaby of oblivion, opium to my grief.
Pleasant in doses, yet inhale too deeply, you choke on air.
Petals bleed crimson—bruises that learned to blossom.
I am a battlefield’s only praise, rotting in forgotten graves.
How many funerals must I attend before decay claims me?
A creature of beauty, mouldering at the altar of narcotics.
Tick… tick… tock.
The gears whisper XIV-XX, carving it into my flesh.
I molt into a deer.
Antlers bloom like fractured chandeliers of quietude.
Grace—both my crown and my guillotine.
Eyes mirroring hunter’s greed.
Flesh trembles like the last leaf clinging to a dying tree.
I crash into headlights that turn green.
A creature of fragility, haunted by the world’s brutality.
Tick… tock… tock.
The gears whisper XX-XV, inscribing it into my skin.
I molt into a swan.
A cathedral of feathers afloat on a goblet stream.
Perfect commotion of silk and linen, a pond of lilies.
Neck carved like a crescent abandoned by moons.
The church’s bells toll endlessly for the final dance.
I mourn for a lover that never comes.
A creature of affection, hollowed into the mausoleum of cursed love.
Tock… tock… tock.
The gears whisper II-V, engraving it into my flesh.
I molt into water.
My veins are rivers drowning their own bones.
An echo that dissolves everything it touches.
A pulse of cold fire, devouring marrow and memory alike.
I seep into fissures no vessel can contain.
A fathomless spree, a storm none can restrain.
A creature birthing life, the hymn of death in disguise.
Tock… tick… tock.
The gears whisper VI-XVIII, carving it into my skin.
At last, I molt into flesh—the cruelest chrysalis.
Carrying fossils of all the “could-have-beens.”
No matter how many skins I shed, I cannot eschew myself.
Both the prayer and the plague, the predator and the prey.
The hand strikes compline; the pendulum rattles like a serrated sigh, V-V.
The code is complete.
Tick…
t
o
c
k
The hands collapse inward like the slow inhale of eternity.
I breathe the chime; the chime breathes me.
A loop that births infinity.
The riddle hums: which is true?
Am I inside the clock,
or is the clock inside me?
Perhaps both…
perhaps neither.
I cannot wait to see ya all trying to decode this—
I FREAKING GOT IT, it's "WANT TO BE FREE", paro is a genius in disguise guys I am telling you.
loved it! so fricking much! so much that it awakened the english lit major brain of mine and i couldnt help but analyse and interpret it. and while i cant write a whole essay in comments heres my not so-short version of it!!
What struck me most in this poem is how it treats time not as something abstract but as something inscribed into the body. The “tick… tock…” is both heartbeat and prison bar; it reminds me that the passage of time doesn’t just happen outside us, it shapes and scars us from within. When the speaker asks at the end, “Am I inside the clock, or is the clock inside me?” I feel that disorientation too: sometimes I feel like I’m running against time, and other times like I am the mechanism itself, trapped in a loop of routines, memories, and regrets.
The sequence of metamorphoses, the moth, poppy, deer, swan, water, flesh, reads to me like a map of human vulnerability. Each stage is beautiful but broken, alive yet on the edge of ruin. The moth reminded me of desire’s self-destructive pull, the way longing often burns us down. poppy felt like the temptation of numbness, how easy it is to dull pain with distractions, yet at the risk of decay. deer captures fragility in a brutal world: hunted, trembling, powerless in the face of headlights. The swan with the grief and yearning, love that curdles into mourning and water is dissolution, the fear of losing all form and self. And finally, molt, flesh, hits hardest, because it’s inescapable. No matter how much we transform, we come back to the body: fragile, mortal, and carrying fossils of “what could have been.”
The usage of numbers was quite fascinating, while I don't exactly know what the lovely writer's intention was with them but the roman numerals for me were connected to tarot cards (don't ask how). Each number is like a stage of metamorphosis aligning with its own archetype.
XXIII-I : Not a traditional Tarot number, but its strangeness itself feels meaningful—like a “broken card” that doesn’t belong, mirroring the moth’s obsession with annihilation.
XIV-XX: Temperance and Judgement. Together, they suggest the poppy’s dual nature: soothing balance versus fatal excess, and the reckoning that comes after indulgence.
XX-XV: Judgement and the Devil. The deer becomes a symbol of being trapped between exposure and entrapment, innocence and corruption.
II-V: The High Priestess and the Hierophant. For the swan, that duality becomes a tension between hidden inner truth (the solitary mourning) and external authority or ritual (the church bells, cursed love).
VI-XVIII: The Lovers and the Moon. For water, this is perfect: the duality of love and illusion, union and dissolution.
V-V: The Hierophant doubled, for flesh. To me, this doubling signifies inevitability, the body as law, tradition, order, something that cannot be escaped no matter how many skins are shed.
What stays with me most is the circularity. No matter how many times we molt, into desire, numbness, fragility, grief, or dissolution we return to flesh, to mortality. The clock doesn’t let us out; instead, it collapses inward, swallowing us into infinity. The poem feels less like a linear story and more like a loop of existence: transformation, inscription, collapse, repetition. And in a strange way, I see myself inside that loop. The poem makes me ask: how many skins of myself have I already shed? How many more will I have to before I accept that the body, the flawed, finite body, is the cruelest chrysalis?